


On The Crumbling Towers Of Sleep

by hit_the_books



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Gen Work, Gormenghast, Kid Fic, Sam has Nightmares, Sleep, Weechesters, Young Dean, Young Dean Winchester, Young Sam, Young Sam Winchester
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-29
Updated: 2015-05-29
Packaged: 2018-04-01 20:28:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 817
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4033495
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hit_the_books/pseuds/hit_the_books
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is based on a request from <a href="http://dreamsfromthebunker.tumblr.com/post/120189059305/young-sam-has-a-nightmare-so-dean-stays-up-with">thentheresthisspazz</a>: <em>Young sam has a nightmare so Dean stays up with him reading or something cute with baby winchesters.</em></p><p>The boys have been left alone in a motel for more than a few days, but Sam keeps having nightmares. Dean has found that by reading to Sam, he can help his little brother drift back to sleep, especially when he reads from Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast trilogy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	On The Crumbling Towers Of Sleep

It’s another motel room. Another small town. And “dad” is out on a job, having head out just two days after Sam’s ninth birthday. The TV set mumbles along in the background, but Dean isn’t watching it. He’s staring at the carpet instead, listening to little Sammy thrash around in his bed. It was the third time in the last five days that his little brother has had such bad nightmares.

Not that Dean watched Oprah and daytime TV talk shows out of habit, but he’d been trying things out to keep Sam’s nightmares at bay. Like sneaking off with him to a nearby playground in the afternoons and getting him to tire himself out, sometimes a local basketball court, so that he’d be too sleepy to have nightmares. He’d also tried coupling it with warm glasses of milk before making him go to bed. But…

Dean always tried to give his brother a chance to work through them, in case… in case he wasn’t there one night.

Sam whimpered.

Enough was enough. Dean got up from the armchair he’d been stewing in, picking up the novel he’d been reading with Sam and went over to his bed.

“Hey… hey,” Dean said as he shook Sam by the shoulder, “it’s just a nightmare.”

Sam kicked at his bed sheets.

“Sammy, it’s not real,” Dean soothed. And then finally,  _finally_ , Sam woke up. There was a sheen to his eyes and his breaths were short and fast.

“Scooch up,” Dean ordered. Sam moved over in his bed and Dean settled down on the sheets beside his younger brother. He opened the book, Peake’s Gormenghast - the only one in their limited collection they’d not already read a thousand times before - on the last page they’d gotten to. It was one of the few novels he could distract Sam with, Peake’s rambling descriptions giving Sam’s imagination so much to work with that he’d soon forget what he’d been so scared of and fall into a deep sleep.

“‘Noon, ripe as thunder and silent as thought, had fled unfingered’,” Dean read out loud and felt Sam rest his head against his right shoulder.

It was a routine, Sam knew. But one he appreciated the ritual of. Having Dean beside him, taking the nightmares away was a comfort he could not express to Dean how much he appreciated. And though Dean knew he dreamed of horrors in the night, Sam hadn’t told the shape these untold things took. How his mind twisted the only people he really had in the world into unrecognisable things: dead or with claws. Or with unimaginable teeth. Even uncle Bobby hadn’t been safe in Sam’s sleep.

Slowly, the drone of the TV set disappeared, and the sting of mental anguish, as Dean helped Sam build the crumbling towers and halls of Gormenghast in his mind and allowed Titus’s struggles to overtake his own, in safety. But as his Sam’s breathing calmed and evened out, Dean once again found himself thinking that maybe, just maybe it would have been good for their dad to have been there.

“‘The glade had been in darkness since the dawn’,” Dean read. He stifled a yawn and looked down at Sam, gently, noting the younger Brother’s eyes weren’t completely closed yet. So he kept reading. His words filling their motel room and conjuring it into something so far removed from what it really was. So distant and otherworldly.

Sam could see it all, in his mind’s eye. And though he had limited empathy for Titus, he appreciated his suffering. Sam did not fight as his mind began to drift and Dean’s words turned to a thick molasses in his ears, pulling him down deeper and deeper to a soft and safe place.

“‘The creature slid from its retreat, and paused for a moment as it crouched at the lip of its dizzy cave,’” Dean yawned and then continued, “and then leaping outwards into space it’… it… it…”

The book slid from Dean’s hands, as he too succumbed to sleep, his head resting on his little brother’s.

Dean did not stir when the door to their motel room opened, hours later. Neither he nor Sammy moved when a blanket was brought over the two of them and tucked around them.

John picked up the book from the floor and placed it on the nightstand. He turned off the TV and settled down in the armchair Dean had been sat in earlier. Dawn would be there soon. A lamp was on beside his seat and he sat with his journal open on his thigh and made a tiny note in the margins of a fresh page.

 _Get the boys a few more books_ , it read. He put down the ruffled tome, and placed his pen beside it. Stretching out in the chair, John closed his eyes and allowed himself to drift off to sleep. 


End file.
